At the Corner of Statistics Road and Business Decision Boulevard (2025-US-30MP-2305)

Life on the manufacturing floor can be painful.  Measurement Systems studies can provide a false sense of security.  Sometimes, designed experiments can start off well, but end up with mediocre results.  Or, our SPC systems can overwhelm everyone with false alarms. The unfortunate result is lost time, wasted resources and rapidly diminishing colleague support.  And to make things worse, as damage to the reputation of statistical methods accumulates, the availability of resources goes from decent to dismal.

The good news is that we can avoid these unpleasant scenarios and encourage the use of statistical methods across organizations by using visual workflows, error-proofing steps and recommended techniques that were refined during a multiyear Pyzdek Institute study.  During the study, we collected insight from clients, gained understanding of the root causes of statistical method disappointment and identified effective preventive measures. The study uncovered many root causes but also revealed an unexpected epiphany: a leading cause of disappointment was using statistical methods without considering important business perspectives.

In this presentation, we'll include five failure case studies along with the steps needed to prevent recurrence. We also make a few controversial recommendations that we hope will trigger interesting, perhaps heated, discussions.  For example:

• Never run a designed experiment as a stand-alone effort
• Teaching MSA, SPC and DOE as separate subjects may not yield the best organizational results
• Beware the use of Optimize Desirability
• You may not know what you already know
• Meeting specification is not the operational goal

By the end of the presentation, attendees will have a better understanding of:

• Why the context of business risk and workflow error-proofing are key to organizational acceptance of statistical methods
• How to learn from the tribulations of other manufacturing organizations
• How to ask Scotty to beam us from The World of Statistics to The World of Business at just the right time